Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

faction at our work. We were sitting side by side facing out the window at the lake, the woods, the mountains alive with dying leaves, chlorophyll receding, revealing the husks of fire. He started to talk. It was pure Malik: two passengers on a train.

"Imagine what that was like, Doc, goin' to Princeton without bein' able to tie your damn shoes? Freshman year was hell."

"Yeah, I know. I felt that way too, my first year at Harvard."

"You too?" he asked. "A red-hot like you?"

"You bet."

"That ain't too convincin', Doc."

"Dickheads Ain't Too Convincin'."

He burst out laughing, but then his face fell. "Yeah, but that was the fork in the damn path. I went down. Guys like you went up."

"Why?" I asked, realizing as I said it that it was a Heiler word, one I'd used with viciousness on Thorny before. But now I'd said it sincerely. He went on in the same friendly tone. So it's not the word, I thought it's what the word travels on. Heiler, on guard, put his patients on guard. If I stayed authentic, I needn't be so careful about what I was saying. A relief.

"Compared to guys like you I felt so damn inferior- Princeton took me 'cuz Daddy was rich-so I tried to find somethin' where I could stand out. I joined the Appalachian Mountain Club, rock-climbin'-all so's I could pound six pitons into the ceiling of my room and hang my bed from 'em. Things fell apart."

"Tell me about it."

Easily, honestly, and in a way that soon had us both laughing at the absurdity of it all, he did. He'd gotten into booze, then narcotics. Opiate in cough medicine was his drug of choice. He'd learned to cough. When he'd run out of emergency room doctors to dupe, he bought a dog and trained it to cough, duping veterinarians for dog cough medicine. All along the way picking fights with bigger men, continually getting beaten up, thrown out of bars, finding himself at dawn lying in desolate parking lots, in ditches.

Listening, I asked myself: Why him and not me? Why, at the end of the day, do I take my keys and let myself out, locking him in? Our histories were not dissimilar-good

genes, busy, battle-weary, obsessive fathers and bored, battle-wise, depressed mothers, bright boyhoods of sports and girls and A's on report cards-similar until we hit college and I dug in and he flipped out. Years later I'm locking him up for the night. Had I myself made myself "succeed"? Had he himself made himself "fail"? Was he defective, I not? Born and raised him, would I be him? The Borderline Theory would say that his sick SELF was his fauk, my less sick SELF my triumph. What horseshit. All at once I saw Thorny not as basically sick, but as basically healthy.

My rotation on Emerson would end in six weeks, just before Thanksgiving. My final week, Heiler would be away in Kuala Lumpur doing "Borderlines of the Pacific Rim." Thorny and I agreed he would leave before I did. He'd have to find a buddy, a place to live, some work.

"A job? Who'd hire a dickhead like me?"

"Not necessarily a job. Work. You don't need money. Volunteer."

"Like my momT He blinked, ran his thumbs up and down his suspenders, and then, shyly, revealed his secret passion. 'Toxic waste?" I nodded, knowing he was thinking of his father, whom he referred to as "the Great Polluter." He licked his lips. "Ozone holes!" He was grinning. His face looked open and powerful. But then fear drifted in. "Shit. Leavin' here scares me."

"We'll work on your fear, together. Like your shoelaces. Deal?"

"Dickheads Make Deals!" He opened the door. "But you gotta take me off the meds-they make me crazy-like all my goddamn narcotics or something."

'Talk to Mr. K. He's running a Department of Defense Drug Support Group."

"Him?Youjokin'?"

I looked down at his shoelaces, as did he. I looked back up at him, meeting his eyes. I asked, "Still tied?"

"Still tied." And men he got it, that now we were rebels together. "Mr. K.?"

"A great American. Send in the next victim."

The next Emersonian came in, and the next, and while I still didn't know what to say to them that might help, I focused on not using Borderline Technique, trying to not be cruel to them,

to not do much of anything to them. It helped. Their radar picked up my trying hard to do nothing to them, and they tried hard to do nothing to me. We shared a sense of relief.

Last, I went to see Zoe in her room. She had been doing better recently and eating solid food, but she refused to see me. I felt ashamed at the way I had screamed at her in the Quiet Room that night with Malik. He'd suggested I apologize. In my many years of medical training, no one had ever suggested that I, a doctor, apologize to a patient. Zoe lay on her bed in jeans and a sweatshirt with Nelson Mandela smiling against the colors of the African National Congress. Knees up like a teenager, she was reading Catcher in the Rye. She stared at me skeptically.

"I'm sorry, Zoe. I lost it, and was cruel to you. I made a mistake."

"Get out."

Feeling hurt, I did. Had I lost her? Lost Cherokee and Christine too? Berry? I drove home overwhelmed with a weird exhaustion, as if to be a shrink were an unnatural act, a movement decidedly against human nature. The lines on the road home wavered as I tried to keep my lids up until I crashed into bed before eight and fell through that membrane to the sleep of the dead.

Phone. I struggled up from the deep, not knowing which country I was in, France or Turkey or China, let alone in what bed.

"Zoe wants to talk to you," the night nurse on Emerson said. It was eleven that same night. I said okay, to put her on. "She won't talk to you on the phone. Afraid you'll hang up. She wants to talk to you in person."

Heiler would have slammed that one out of the park. "Be right there."

Zoe sat in the living room, ashen and scared. "I… I just wanted to say… that… I accept your apology. And that we can start to work together again."

"Great. Glad to hear it."

"Your cruelty wasn't your fault. I mean you've only been a psychiatrist a few months. You're still learning, struggling with incompetence, right?"

"Who isn't?"

Startled, she stared at me quizzically. "Really." She

Samue! Shctn

yawned. "Anyway that's all 1 wanted to say. Go home to your wife and kids."

NO ONE KNOWS what a shrink is doing behind closed doors. Solini and I found it easy to be not cruel to our patients without anyone knowing.

The week that Heiler was away, we worked hard to un-Heiler. It was astonishing to see just how quickly we and our patients shifted from adversaries to allies. Soon our patients, no longer under attack, no longer attacked; no longer humiliated, they no longer humiliated; treated more humanely, they acted more humanely. It was all so obvious-but what Malik called "the elusive obvious." Henry and I soon had a sense that we were riding some pretty strong unseen forces, much like, as we walked toward Emerson those bright crisp fall mornings, we'd see the last fugitive leaves spinning in scarlet and gold whirlwinds, riding the unseen breeze.

That Friday afternoon Heiler was due back from Germany. I was scheduled to see him at six that night, to report on the three wards of Emerson. As the time approached, I realized that, face-to-face, under pressure from those blue jolts of eyes, I might not be able to lie. At six sharp I called him in his office. My heart was racing. I said, "I can't make it to supervision."

"Why?"

"I'm beat, and Berry and I are leaving early tomorrow

morning to hike."

'To hikeT he said derisively. "You realize that while you're out hiking, other psychiatry residents will be in their labs, working? Getting ahead?"

"I need to take care of myself, that's-"

"Have a 'nice' hike," he said and hung up.

The next afternoon Berry and I were taking a break from our day-hike up nearby Mount Jackson, in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. The view was exquisite, the long bright rainbow of autumnal color stretching west at the bottom of the clear cold sky, the stretch coalescing the spectrum into a smudged pastel and then into an imagined smudge over an imagined Lake Champlain and, even, an imagined curve of the planet itself. Having been stuck behind the long caravan of Winnebagos and Airstreams fighting their way up the Kancamagus Highway to "see the leaves," having found a